Quote Originally Posted by katladyd View Post
You and your hubby are fine. It's your CHILDREN who need therapy! How ungrateful can they be? Just keep doin' what you're doin' and let the kids sleep in the messy bed they have made for themselves and their children. You might call them and offer to see the grandkids (leaving them out of it). On Christmas give the grandkids amazing presents and give the parents a card. They will get the message, believe me. You are not doormats anymore and if they want positive things from you, they will have to respect you first.
Thank you.

Though I had to laugh over the Christmas gift thing. I bought the kids great gifts this year: each got between $500-$1000 worth of limited edition artwork that THEY picked out. (Oh goodness, I never paid that much!)

Ashley and Tony never picked theirs up. I'm redoing the spare bedroom, so its getting the picture that was destined for Ashley (REALLY cool custom artwork of black branches arranged on handmade rice paper. My one coworker constantly tells me that if I don't find a place for it, that she could find a place in her home

Tony's artwork will go in the dining room once I redo that. I have to redo both rooms because we had a major freak hail storm that did $40,000 (yes, forty thousand) worth of damage to the house, put a hole in the roof where I could see daylight through the ceiling and the bedroom flooded through to the dining room. I currently have a patch on the roof that leaks with every new rain, no ceiling in either room and bowed walls from the drywall/plaster expanding with moisture. Its lovely and Callie keeps tinkling in the bedroom, which, since we have nothing on the floors, and no ceiling, pours right through to the dining room - she never did that until tony moved out (one week before the storm). Insurance has been decent, and are giving us nearly $32,000 to do the repairs. Right now hubby is rebuilding the shed, which is saving us a lot of the missing insurance money - between what they gave us, and us doing a huge amount of the manual labor, we'll break even without owing anybody anything. But I digress....

Heather got hers and asked me to hang them. The day I showed up, her Mother-in-law and sister-in-law looked at me with daggers and said "He will not want you to hang those - he wants to do it!" (Heather wasn't home and her hubby was upstairs during the interaction). So I got back in the car and headed home. When she found out what they said she was furious. All I could do was shrug - at least hubby and I enjoyed a nice lunch at a restaurant by her home we never get to visit.

So, lets just say, they will not be getting any gifts from us in the foreseeable future. I, however, get to enjoy my gifts.